A familiar face enters the commonwealth’s gubernatorial race
Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe formally announced his candidacy for another term last week, saying he wants ‘to think big, and to be bold’
If you want a seminar on modern political campaigning, carefully observe former Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s bid for a second term as Virginia’s chief executive.
Watch the master dance his way through difficult channels and necessary alignments. The choreography. The dexterity. The footwork. Fred Astaire, eat your heart out.
McAuliffe formally announced his candidacy on Wednesday in front of a Richmond elementary school — “I am running for governor again to think big, and to be bold, and to take the commonwealth of Virginia to the next level, and to lift up all Virginians” — surrounded by some of Virginia’s biggest and boldest Black political figures.
That by itself announces the core dynamic of the Virginia Democratic Party and its June 8 nomination contest. You need no expertise to figure out the rough demographic mix of the primary’s participants, who will be notably diverse.
“We need (McAuliffe) to lift the Black community from the crippling pandemic, because he knows that it has hit the Black communities, Black communities and brown communities harder than anyone else,” state Sen. L. Louise Lucas said at the kickoff. “We need his experience and tested leadership, tested leadership, tested leadership.”
Louise didn’t say that three times by accident. The savvy Portsmouth Democrat intends to get a few things done in the years ahead and knows that McAuliffe can raise beaucoup bucks and marshal political support as few others.
Experience. That’s the pitch here. That’s what sets up the contrast with McAuliffe’s three, lesser-experienced opponents: Richmond state Sen. Jennifer McClellan; former Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy (she resigned her
House seat last week to campaign full-time); and Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax.
About Fairfax, let’s just say McClellan and Foy are both impressive and sound. Though between the three of them, they may divide the Black vote in the primary and thus free Mr. Experience to waltz away with the nomination.
McAuliffe is the consummate political professional and his prior experience as governor, including his passion for business development, certainly counts for something, especially when considering the COVID-induced economic challenges facing Virginia.
The likely Republican candidate will be former Speaker of the House Kirk Cox. He’s not previously campaigned statewide (it’s not as easy as it looks) but knows state government inside and out.
Cox can step to the podium and dissect state policies far better than most. Debates between McAuliffe and Cox, should that occur, could be genuinely useful and informative — a worthy exercise in civic engagement.
McAuliffe wishes to make a hefty $2 billion push on public education, “to adopt and fully fund the Virginia Board of Education’s 2019 Prescribed Standards of Quality (SOQs),” he says.
That harkens back 40 years to Democrat Chuck Robb’s successful race for governor, when a commitment to the standards first began to shape election outcomes. Gov. Jerry Baliles took up the issue, too, during his 1985 campaign for governor and made “full funding” a core campaign promise.
We are overdue a new public discussion. No one understands the SOQs much anymore (that includes a substantial portion of the General Assembly) and getting buy-in at the local level will be crucial to success.
It’s been a half century since Virginia adopted the Education Article, Article VIII, in the state Constitution. Backed by state revenue from the sales tax, passed in the 1960s, the SOQs fundamentally advanced Virginia’s economic and social fortunes.
Implementation of the standards, however, developed over time into a bureaucratic engine of considerable complexity. Former Speaker Cox may well wish to challenge some of its working tenets and that would not be a bad thing, either. Virginia needs this debate.
Of course, for his part, Cox may prefer to stress his readiness to arrest Democratic Party excess — most particularly that emanating from the House of Delegates, where Democrats took control last January.
You wonder why House Democrats never saw an advantage in restraint during in their first year in regained power. They could have carved out some political space of their own, apart from the national Democratic agenda.
They did otherwise and may have effectively teed up the ball for Cox and others to have at it. You can see it coming on the subject of law enforcement (expect to hear plenty about the Parole Board) and it may go other directions, too.
Will President Trump slip into the mix? He could, based a desire to demonstrate his continuing relevance and political clout. If that happens, it won’t just be McAuliffe doing the quick step.
After writing editorials for the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot in the 1980s, Gordon C. Morse wrote speeches for Gov. Gerald L. Baliles, then spent nearly three decades working on behalf of corporate and philanthropic organizations, including PepsiCo, CSX, Tribune Co. and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Dominion Energy. His email address is gordonmorse@msn.com.